Monday, August 16, 2010

Looks like it's two misses in a row for one of the newer BoLS writers. Here's hoping for a 3rd strike, resulting in him being thrown off the site. From the man who brought us the tale of chicken little explaining quite erroneously how the new* concept of true line of site is killing warhammer, we get a wonderfully terrible write up of why wound allocation is ruining the game. Seriously, if there are so many forces conspiring against your ability to enjoy the game, maybe you should just quit.

Imaddj is quickly becoming one of my favorite BoLS writers, for all the wrong reasons. To begin with we've got the name. What's up with that seriously? Is he a ddj? Is he a mad dj that can't use verbs? I won't speculate any further beyond that.

Last week, as I mentioned, he vomited the worst article about TLOS ever written all over the interwebs. I think a lot of you were expecting me to say something about that, but sometimes an article is just too obviously bad or has already been beaten to death. In that case, both were true. So I'm not going to say anything about it other than that it was factually inaccurate, had admittedly made up statistics presented as fact, and tried too hard to be cute. The inaccuracies were probably the worst part of the whole thing. Somebody (it may have even been the author- no fucking way I'm wading through 400 comments to find it again) said that, and I'm paraphrasing here, 'opinion pieces don't need to be factually accurate.' Worst argument ever. Opinion pieces especially should be based on fact. The absence of fact in opinion is what has created things like the tea party here in the states.

Having just been posted, I think it's early enough for me to get a good whine in about his newest article, Wound Allocation- cheating with loopholes?, though. God I hate it when titles have question marks in them. It's the biggest most trite douche bag move of all time. I also hate it when somebody makes sweeping generalizations about something that is "new" to the game that is actually a mechanic that is now going on 2 years old.

Now here's what we're going to do. Rather than go through and snowmobile the whole thing, which I could do, I'm just going to hit his major bullet points and refute them- with profanity! Fuck yeah!

Time to get this going since I think my intro will be longer than the rest of the article.....

Wound allocation was supposed to help the shooter
Guess what dickhead, it still does in most cases. Just to make sure I'm not talking out of my ass, I even grabbed my 4th ed rulebook to look up the old casualty removal rules. If you still have the book, they start on page 26, if you want to reference them at any point. Under the old system, the owner of the target unit (or catcher, receiver, bottom, power bottom or whatever else you'd like to call him) decides which models to remove or give wounds to. Sgt. with a power fist? Multi-melta? Flamer? Well looks like you'll have 7 other bodies to wade through before any of them die. Those special weapons will pretty much always be around to haunt you, until the unit is removed entirely. Now, if you torrent the shit out of a unit, there's a chance for all those toys to go away earlier, helping out the shooter. Can it be abused? Well of course, just like most rules it can be in extreme circumstances. For reference see FNIF round 22 about stretching termagants across the board. Good thing there aren't many opportunities in the game to do this. Really nob bikers and shooting units with weapons with differing AP are the only things that come to mind immediately. As you'll see later there are even good arguments behind why the AP rules make sense in 5th.

Many People don't actually use wound allocation
Sweet, more sweeping generalizations made up from a representative sample of n=0. Fuck off. If you're not using this rule, you're playing not 40k, plain and simple. It's a fundamental rule, you can't skip it. Sure people fuck up and get antsy and just start removing casualties sometimes, but this really isn't even worth discussing. Next!

Wound allocation slows the game down
Yes it does, thanks for sharing captain obvious of the obvious task force to point out the obvious. Good thing that many other changes to the fundamentals of 40k, like TLOS and vehicle damage charts, speed things up. I think the game still plays more quickly overall, but hey that's just my opinion based on a lot of research that I didn't do. Sometimes a change is needed in a rule to make it more fair (which I think it is- again, see my made up research study) even if it takes a little longer. Plus, when you get down to it, he never raises the point that the new rule, while slower, is actually less complicated than the old one. No more of this 'if the unit takes a number of wounds equal to or greater than the number of models in the unit, the firer may select one casualty' bullshit. Fuck that! I'll take more straightforward rule without a 'see subclause 1c' situation any day of the week.

Wound allocation actually helps the target, not the shooter?
Good job repeating the inverse of your first topic (since we're all about math and statistics today that would be topic A^-1). Back to writing 101 for you. Everything I said above still applies here. At least this time we get some concrete examples- nob bikers, of course, and an AP situation. He calls this cheating. Note, it's not cheating if it's allowed by the rules, dipshit. Now specifically regarding the AP situation, we are given a unit of 6 marines that takes 6 plasma and 6 lasgun wounds. Imaddj is confused about why 3 men could absorb all 6 plasma shots. He says it isn't realistic. Is it more realistic to consider that all 6 shots hit a different target? That must be one ace trick shooter. I've found that when playing a game with plastic toy soldiers it's best to have an imagination. This might help you make it through the hobby imaddj. Until you do manage to loosen up, though, please stop writing.

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*and by new I mean 2 years old. Get used to it people, we're well into 5th edition. Learn to suck less and get ready for 6th in 3-5 years so you can have something new to complain about.

28 comments:

My regular opponent plays Guard and in 4th it always seemed like the last guys standing in his infantry squads were the guy with the missile launcher and his buddy rocking a grenade launcher (which was legit, so I'm not bitching about it). So yeah, that was very "realistic" - just like all the laser guns and space aliens and flying tanks.

You also may have identified his next article by mentioning vehicle damage charts. People piss and moan about that all the time at my FLGS. Especially when they're across the board from my Chimera wall.

Clearly imaddj has neither seen enough crappy action movies nor read enough crappy Black Library "novels". Martyrs can absorb an insane amount of firepower when required by the story as they dive in front of their brethren/loved ones/the one guy in the squad holding the missile launcher/characters with full names and backstories.

Ill admit: Imaddj's article about TLOS ruinging the game was pretty fuckin weak. Ive never had a problem with it really and I totally enjoy TLOS over the old complicated style.

As for wound allocation, I'll deal with it. Yeah, it pisses me off and it robs me of killing more of my opponent. Plus, I ALWAYS fucking fail my aspiring champion save and my bolter guys seem to be fucking invunerable. But thats just my luck.

I played a game once when i rapid fired and hit with about 5 plasma guns into a techmarine with his servitor friends. Then i fired a bunch of lasguns. Then i found my error. The opponent put all the plasma gun hits on the useless sevitors and the techmarine HQ walked away without a scratch. It was really disappointing and...yeah...i think wound allocation can really fuck some things up. But whatever. Next time, i WONT shoot my lasguns.

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